Short review of a recent journal article. Color associations and how they differ (or not) with culture fascinates me.

In a typical kitchen or bathroom you often find the hot and cold water taps labelled red and blue.

It’s common practice in industrial and interior design in many parts of the world to present information about temperature by means of colour cues. People often talk about painting a room in warm hues such as yellows and oranges.

This association of a colour with a temperature is known as “crossmodal correspondence” and has been known about for many years.

But why do we make these associations? Are they learned just because that’s the way hot and cold have always been labelled, or is there some deeper association?

But now, a new Silicon Valley startup wants to change all that by harnessing a feature that most channels already output—closed captioning. Boxfish captures all closed-captioning information, indexes it, then makes that data searchable in a Twitter-style interface. All in real-time.

I had to learn about shin splints the hard way in track. . . What I was told to do to avoid them was to start drawing the alphabet in the air with my toes each day. It’s a good way to ensure you do enough of the exercise to actually get some benefit. Apparently it’s a matter of the front calf muscles and their tendons being too weak and you have to gradually move up to more use of them to avoid the small tears and inflammation that cause shin splints.